Seven Days in Timor Leste (Part 1): A Day At The Market

Organic fruits and vegetables from the mountain are brought down by the farmers on vans like this one, to sell in the villages once a week. In a Timorese village in the district of Liquiçá, you can find anything from live pigs to tobacco to seaweed freshly caught off the coast.

Farmers ride down the mountain in vans like this, a trip taking about two hours one-way, to the village with their wares.

A customer interested in the dried tobacco which he will handroll into cheroots for smoking. In the foreground are mahogany-coloured avocados.

Seaweed so fresh and green.

This is what it looks like brought home and washed, sliced, and sautéed with garlic, shallots, some chilli. Don’t forget the sugar and vinegar for a tangy appetizer.

Meat Cart: Raw meat, probably pork, hangs inside a cart.

It’s 7.30am in the midweek, and the market is a place to socialise and catch up on village and clan news.

Roosters having a go at each other.

Comments? The urban experience of ‘going to the market’ even in Southeast Asia today is so far removed from the source that these scenes of a preset-day village market in East Timor looks exotic even for someone like me, who used to follow my grandmother to wet markets in Singapore in the late 1970s.